The United States is, by many measures, a global environmental leader, except for four years under former President Trump. It has some of the strongest environmental laws in the world, such as the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act. The country invests billions of dollars to fight Climate change And Wildlife declines. And it produces a lot World-leading environmental research.
For the most partThe country prides itself on this environmental success.
That’s what makes it so surprising: the United States is the only nation in the world, other than the Vatican, that has not joined the most important global treaty for nature conservation. The agreement, known as the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), is not just some redundant agreement. The convention is designed to protect Earth’s life support systems, its animals and ecosystems – a mission that requires global cooperation.
The Convention achieved one of its most important achievements in 2022 when its member states agreed on a The Breakthrough New DealHalting biodiversity loss by 2030, called the Global Biodiversity Framework. The agreement has 23 goals, including conserving at least 30 percent of land and oceans and reducing annual subsidies that cost at least $500 billion in ecosystem damage. Experts hailed it as the Paris Agreement for Natureglobal agreementTo combat climate change.
This week and next, officials from these member countries are meeting in Cali, Colombia at an event known as COP16 to formally review their progress. They will also discuss several other issues, including how to manage genetic data from plants and animals stored in open-access databases.
A senior State Department official told Vox that the US government is sending a large delegation to Cali, including technology experts. But while the delegation will try to influence the talks, it will have no formal say in any outcome. So, for example, if countries come up with a plan to handle genetic data, the US won’t be able to formally object if the terms aren’t agreed upon.
Experts say it’s a problem. Solving the biodiversity crisis is a huge task, and one that requires reforming entire industries and financial flows that harm nature, such as industrial agriculture and the subsidies that sustain it. As the largest economy on the planet, the United States has a lot of control over those industries.
So why is it not being discussed?
President Bush refused to sign a biodiversity treaty that the United States helped craft
Almost half a century ago, scientists were already warning that many species were at risk of extinction – just as they are today. In fact, the headlines of the time are very familiar: “Scientists say a million species are in dangerRead one in 1981, which is almost identical a title From 2019.
These concerns ignited a series of meetings between environmental groups and UN officials in the 80s and early 90s, which laid the groundwork for an agreement to protect biodiversity. U.S. diplomats were heavily involved in the negotiations, said William Snape III, an environmental lawyer and an assistant dean at American University and senior counsel for the Center for Biological Diversity, an advocacy group.
“It was the United States that championed the idea of a biodiversity treaty in the 1980s and was influential in getting efforts off the ground in the early 1990s,” Snape wrote in the journal Sustainable Development Law and Policy In 2010.
In the summer of 1992, the CBD was opened for signature at a major United Nations conference in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. lay it Three goals: Conserve biodiversity (from genes to ecosystems), use its components in a sustainable way, and equitably share the benefits of genetic resources.
Dozens of countries signed the agreement then and there, including the UK, China and Canada. But the United States—under then-President George HW Bush—was notably not one of them. And it largely came down to politics: It was an election year that pitted Bush against then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, and several senators from Bush’s party opposed signing the deal, citing broader concerns.
One of them feared that US biotech companies would have to share their intellectual property related to genetics with other countries. There was also widespread concern that the United States would be responsible for helping poor countries — financially and otherwise — protect their natural resources, and that the agreement would impose more environmental regulations on the United States. (At the time, there was already pushback from the timber industry and property rights groups to existing environmental laws, including the Endangered Species Act.)
Some industries also opposed the signing. As environmental lawyer Robert Blomquist writes A 2002 article for the Golden Gate University Law ReviewBoth the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association and the Industrial Biotechnology Association have sent letters to Bush saying they oppose signing the CBD in the US due to intellectual property rights concerns.
President Clinton signed the treaty but could not find support for ratification
In 1992, Clinton won the election and, in a move applauded by conservatives, signed the agreement shortly after taking office. But joining the CBD still had one major hurdle: ratification by the Senate, which required 67 votes.
Clinton was well aware of CBD opposition in Congress. So when he sent the deal to the Senate for ratification in 1993, he included it Seven “understandings”which sought to address IP and sovereignty concerns. Basically, they make it clear that, as a party to the treaty, the United States will not be forced to do anything and that it will retain sovereignty over its natural resources, Schnepp wrote. Clinton too Emphasizes that the United States already has strong environmental laws And they don’t need to make more to meet CBD’s goals.
In a promising move, the bipartisan Senate Foreign Relations Committee overwhelmingly recommended that the Senate approve the deal, deeming it certain to pass. At the time, the biotech industry also threw its support behind the deal, Blomquist wrote.
Nevertheless, then-GOP Sens. With Jesse Helms and Bob Doll Many of their colleaguesPreventing ratification of the convention from ever coming to a vote, Snape repeated the same argument. The deal stalled on the Senate floor.
And that brings us up to speed: There is no president has opened the treaty for ratification from
GOP lawmakers still resist deals — any deal
Three decades later, concerns about American sovereignty remain, particularly within the Republican Party. And keep the US out of the deal. Conservative lawmakers stand in the way not only of the CBD, but of several other treaties awaiting Senate approval, including the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
Stuart Patrick, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Vox in 2021, “Conservative nationalists in the United States (including the Senate) have long distrusted international treaties. They see them, he added, “as efforts by the United Nations and foreign governments to to impose limitations on constitutional liberties, interfere with the activities of the US private sector, and create redistributive schemes.”
In other words, not a whole lot has changed.
In 2021, a week after Biden was sworn into office, the Heritage Foundation, an influential right-wing think tank, published a report He has called on the Senate to oppose a handful of treaties while in office, “on the grounds that they threaten the sovereignty of the United States.” These include the CBD, the Arms Trade Treaty, and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, among others. (Environmental agreements like the CBD tend to draw strong opposition from conservative lawmakers, who often fear environmental regulations more than other agreements, Snape said.)
Legal experts say the sovereignty concerns are not justified. The treaty states that countries retain jurisdiction over their own environment. In fact, US negotiators confirmed this when they helped craft the deal in the 90s, Patrick said wrote In Review World Politics in 2021. “States have … the sovereign right to exploit their own resources in accordance with their own environmental policies,” it reads Section 3 of CBD. (Article 3 states that states are also responsible for ensuring that other countries do not harm the environment.)
“The convention poses no threat to US sovereignty,” wrote Patrick, the author Sovereignty wars.
And what about other concerns? Patrick wrote that the agreement requires any transfer of genetic technology to poor countries to comply with IP rights in rich countries. Clinton’s Seven Understandings also confirmed that joining the CBD would not undermine American IP rights and clarified that the agreement could not obligate the United States to contribute a certain amount of financial resources.
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Joining the CBD is unlikely to require anything in the way of new domestic environmental policy, Snape and Patrick say. “The United States is already complying with key terms of the agreement: it has a highly developed system of protected natural areas, and policies to reduce biodiversity loss in ecologically sensitive areas,” writes Patrick.
Will the US ever join CBD?
The United States says it embraces the convention’s objectives — that is, conserving and sharing nature’s benefits — and has worked hard to bring about an ambitious global biodiversity framework.
The State Department told Vox that it supports that framework, with the exception of a few goals surprisingly related to the private sector. These include reducing government subsidies that damage the environment and increasing foreign aid spending on conservation. This is partly because decisions about government spending often require congressional approval. US representatives cannot unilaterally agree to monetary targets.
This brings us, again, to what is ultimately the strongest obstacle to US environmental action: Congress. Funding reforms and conservation of industries that damage nature would require the approval of a heavily divided Congress, as would joining the Convention on Biological Diversity.
For the foreseeable future, the vote is not there.
And if former President Trump wins the election next month, the prospect of joining the CBD will only become more dire, Patrick said. Some of the goals under the Global Biodiversity Framework — such as the goal to conserve 30 percent of the U.S.’s land — are “completely unpalatable to any potential Trump administration,” he said.
This ultimately makes it difficult for the Convention, this life-long agreement, to do anything.
“The world is in an environmental emergency,” Patrick said. “Given its scale, it’s embarrassing for the United States to be AWOL. It’s already a heavy lift to debilitate.”
